PM has lost it

[happyhippy]

Demi,not sure where you were residing in the UK when you were here,but I can assure you the whole of the UK is not running wild with yobs.Yes we have our problems in some places,but for the most part,the UK is a great place to live.I lived in another country for 30 years and the grass is'nt always greener on the other side!

[oldjerry]

i think its idiotic to be paying people not to work, wheres the logic in that?

i think they should make it maditory to do volentry work in order to recieve benifits. if the person cannot find work themselves then they should be given something to do by the job center, picking up rubbish and maintaining the public areas; the parks and high streets ect, whould be a grate use of their time and a benifit to the community instead of leaving them to hang arround on the streets terrorising the local residents. it would, hopfully, teach them some work ethic and be something to put on their CV futher improving their chances of getting a payed job.


i think the problem with the youth in question in the UK ( and their familys ) is that they no longer have any fear of athaurity. the police ( and school teachers ) nare no longer allowed to beat the crap out of you and because of this these people dont care if they get arrested and put in jail for the week end. and if they get a few months at least they are getting all their food, board and drugs handed to them on a plate. you know they get TV'S in their cells and everythihng!!!!! their all in there together, like minded people aka total moronic wastes of oxygen. its not punnishment for them, its a holiday. they have no fear of it so there is nothing to discourage them for commiting crimes.

in yugoslavia the police would, and still do, beat you to within an inch of your life. there is very low crime levels here. people are afraid of the police. iv been told that before, if you dropped your wallet in the street you could come back a few days later and it would still be there. no one would touch it for fear of being accused stealing it.
same goes in schools, all the childeren are well bahaved. my husband said his teacher used to hit the kids with the text book if they got the answer wrong iv been ashured they are no longer supposed to do this, but the kids have respect for the teachers and are gererally very well mannered. we live right next to a school here and i have never see the kids fighting with each other. at my high school there were fights every day. my husband had never seen girls fighting until he was in greece and there was loads of brittish and american tourists who were allways getting drunk and fighting with each other.

also here you dont see loud drunk people on the streets throwing up, trying to start fights, loosing their shoes and passing out in the gutters. i dont even know what the legal drinking age is, maybe there isnt one, but there are no drunk teenagers hanging arround outside shops terrorising people.

haha! thanx god i left good riddence, you can keep them

also theres no binifits here, people out of work relay on their familys to support them. everyone have a very strong work ethic. every morning you see a whole load of men standing in the square in the center looking for manual work. if you need someone to help you do something you just go a pick somone up from the square to work for you. thats what the out of work youth should be doing instead of being payed to do nothing.

I'd always blamed the Dutch for Srebrenica,maybe I was wrong.........

[the.fee.fairy]

The problem is that there has been a lot of weakening of authority figures.

The teachers don't have control because they're not allowed to 'hurt a child's self esteem', the parents don't have control because children can report them to childline (I know a family that this happened to).

The family that I know are now all grown up. However, when the children were younger, they were playing up somewhere and the mother gave both of the older girls a slap across the back of the legs. The eldest child thought it was a great idea to report her mother to Childline. The next thing they knew, social services were on their doorstep asking questions. All 3 girls were put on the at-risk register for the rest of their childhoods...

The Human Rights Act is being used wrongly to accuse and protect people that shouldn't be accused or protected. All of this stuff in schools about not being able to reprimand a child because they might get upset just means that they grow up to learn that they can do as they want and no-one can stop them.

Case in point: Recently a female headmistress was sacked because she grabbed a child by the arm and took him in from the playground. The Governors voted to sack her because she had touched him. The child in question wouldn't come in when he was told to.
Why was he told to? Because a man was seen on the grounds of the school performing a sex act on himself. The children were called in for their own safety.

So kid has now learnt that if he wants to do something, he should and anyone who stops him can lose their jobs.

If I had a detention when I was younger, my dad would give ma a clip round the ear and tell me that it was my own fault, i shouldn't have misbehaved. Now, we have parents going to the schools demanding that their child is not given detention. What are teachers suppose to do?

To be fair, the police haven't helped themselves in the losing of respect. Instead of actually sorting out minor crime, they went about putting up speed cameras and giving stupid fines to people. During the G8 they decided to get heavy handed. At Climate Camp they got heavy handed, thinking they were the big men. At Stansted Airport they all walk around in their bulletproof vests with guns looking like the heavy mob. The police lost respect for the general populus, which leads to the population losing respect for them.

The media need a kick up the backside because they glamourise drinking - every week there's pictures of celebrities falling out of cars drunk. 50 years ago, the pictures would show the celeb with a drink in hand, but not drunk. Now, it's cool to be drunk.

I'm not convinced that people on benefits should be forced to do voluntary work. This just leads to something like the te$cos debacle - decent jobs that could be given to paid workers being given to 'volunteers'. If there is a good voluntary job, then by all means send the person there, but not to a job that needs doing and could be paid. More help for educating those on benefits would be a good idea. For example, I can't afford to get a CELTA certificate, which means that I'm unemployed during the summer. Now, I don't claim benefits because I have a job in September, and because I haven't paid in. However, When I move back to the UK, I'd like to be able to do the CELTA course. But the benefits office won't help because I have a degree. This is ridiculous. A CELTA would help me to get a full-time job, but because I'm already educated (my degree is a classic degree, but worthless on it's own apparently) there's nothing there to help. If more benefits claimants (I'm talking about the career claimants, not the ones that need it for other reasons) were given that little bit of education, it would help them in the job market.

Strangely, there are no benefits here. However, there are a lot of things done to help people get jobs. The government create jobs for people (not all of them worthy jobs, but they'e still paid jobs). They have a chinese first attitude, so someone who is Chinese will get a job in preference of someone who is not (even in jobs like mine. The University have to have a licence to hire a foreigner).

What I see in the UK is that society has slowly been broken down by the powers that be, and they're going to have a hard job rebuilding it. It's a difficult job with many milestones to reach, but I hope that they work at it and succeed.

[demi]

Demi,not sure where you were residing in the UK when you were here,but I can assure you the whole of the UK is not running wild with yobs.Yes we have our problems in some places,but for the most part,the UK is a great place to live.I lived in another country for 30 years and the grass is'nt always greener on the other side!

im from arround glasgow. born in govan, lived my childhood in paisley, moved to the country just outside barhead ( about 30min drive from glasgow) when i was 15, then i moved to cessnock when i was at uni ( right next to ibrox, where rangers football stadium is ) iv had my fair share of yobs. iv seen the gangs on the streets and iv been caught in the cross fire. iv had friends badly beaten, some actually stabbed, but all have been given hastle by NED's ( non-educated delinquent )
I HATE them with avengance. iv known people who have commited suaside in part due to the daily hasstle they were getting off some neds.

anyway, its much better here, although there is still some political problems with the muslim albainians causing trouble, burning churches ect, but thats just in the albainian villages on the border with kosovo. people are saying that albainia wasnt to join with kosovo and include part of macedonia arround the border to make 'grater albainia' . they seem to be expanding in all driections from albainia and claiming the neibouring countrys for themselves.
anyway, macedonians are much more civil than the albainians, and luckily we dont have any albainians in our town, not any that cause trouble anyway. its a shame they cant just all intergrate and get along with each other. but ethnic tention is the foundation of the whole reacent history of the bulkans.

but my point is, i feel safe here. theres no neds here, no gangs of youths trawling the streets looking for trouble. i can walk anywhere in this town at any time of day or night by myself and i know im safe. especially with my big st bernard, who is not friendly with other people, with me

even where my parents stay, in a tiny hamlet with all of 12 houses, no wait they have built 2 more houses, with all of 14 houses, there is still a couple of dodgy people living there and the police have had to be called a few times on them. there is no getting away from neds, not in central scotland anaway.
the hight school i went to was horrendous, actually i went to 2 high schools as my mum moved me after i got attacked a few times, then i got attacked again the the other high school and i was out of there as soon as 4th year exams were over. im happy to say that since leaving school iv never been personally attacked since. but i dont fight and the ned kids in school new that so i was an easy target to make them look big. again, i HATE them! thay should all die!!!! not really but they deserve to be punnished more harshly than how they are being treated by the justace system at the moment.

[happyhippy]

Demi,I'm sorry to hear of your experiences.My own kids were bullied,especially my youngest,so I understand how that could affect you alot.There are some places in the UK I would definately not choose to live in,and I am lucky that where I live,yes I can walk the streets at night safely.I think sometimes the UK can get a really bad rap.I belong to a migration forum,and I hear regularly people who can't wait to get the hell out of here.What the poor souls don't realise that,what affects them here,and what goes on here,is also rife in the place they want to emigrate to!I'm a realists,and I do tell people how it is!If there is a utopia?Please someone tell me where it is,and I'll move there myself (PM me as I don't want every man and his dog moving there as well lol lol)

[Green Aura]

I'm sure all Albanians aren't bad - they did put up a statue to Norman Wisdom!

[demi]

well i think we found our eutopia here with our orchard that we bought that we can retreat to in the peace and quiet surrounded by nature :) . and once we build the house there we will be living there in the summer months, working and living off the land with my family. thats my eutopia :) far far away from all the neds in glasgow

of course not all the albainians are bad. funnily enough the majority of albainians left in albainia are christian and generally more peacefull than their muslim counter parts who are expanding accross eastern europe, out numbering the locals then demanding their own state eg bosnia and kosovo

[cherami]

This is an interesting debate, but I wonder what is really meant by the term Riot and the word criminal, because I doubt very much that we would be experiencing the life we lead today if some of these things did not happen. I see no need for the government to go down this road at all. They should be thankful that they don't live in Egypt or similar countries.

If a person wants to go out and steal or smash things up, I think there are enough laws available to deal with that said problem. Shop lifting for young mothers who don't have enough to feed their children has been highlighted by the police of late, so to remove more money from them would hardly be logic. If I were in a situation that would require a riot for the government to come to a logical conclusion about a situation and the only way in which to get noticed was to riot then I think I would unwillingly go down that road.

It helped with the Poll Tax which we are all thankful not to have to pay.

[MKG]

<rant>

Here you go, cherami ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot

It's defined in law, and a criminal is a person who, for whatever reason, contravenes the law.

But that's not what you meant, I think. You go on to say that we have enough laws to deal with the situation and then, in the next couple of sentences, point out how they could be illogical and give us an example in which you would ignore them. That's a wonderful illustration of the predicament.

We have laws (oh, Jesus, do we have laws!) coming out of our backsides. Some of them are archaic, some are overly Draconian, some are a waste of the paper they're printed on - but they're the laws. If any of them don't work, the idea is to utilise the power of democracy to get them changed. It's slow, but that's the way to do it in a democracy and to attempt to do it any other way is, by definition, not democracy.

At the same time, we have an overly-high number of people in financial and social difficulties. We have to do something about them, but their case is not helped in the slightest by the obscenely large number of shit-for-brains wasters whose only desire is to get as much as they can from anywhere they can get it without actually doing anything to even form a pretence that they deserve it.

It's two problems masquerading as one, but we cannot even approach the "real" problem unless we first deal with the ancillary one. But let's not confuse the two. "Deserving case" does not equal "bag of crap", that's true. But let's reverse that - "bag of crap" most certainly does not equal "deserving case", even though the deserving cases are being swamped by misanthropes.

Only when we can successfully find a way to separate the two do we have any chance of solving either of the problems.

<end rant>

But back to the forum - I haven't noticed you around before, so welcome to the menagerie and enjoy. Contentious topics don't come up often, and everyone here is otherwise extraordinarily friendly. Except Demi, of course, but she's strange (Oh dear - I'm going to pay for that, I'm sure )

Mike

[cherami]

Hi Mike, I think we have to choose which fight we need to undertake, I personally don't think that laws in general are there to protect the normal person in the street but to protect the rights of the people who make them.

I came across a video the other day where the rich and large companies are holding people to ransom in India and other places over seeds and that so far over 250,000 people had committed suicide because of this problem. The people who are involved in mindless violence because of the thrill or whatever should be dealt with of course, how is another matter altogether.

But the government are just pretending to do something by bringing in laws that they think may frighten or deter these criminal elements from committing any more crime, we all know this will not be the case, but if this law were passed it may well effect some very innocent people and make their struggle much harder.

The way in which we live today is I am afraid a very complex system and there is never going to be a quick solution.

I have been around for some time but never seem to be able to get the time, I have been struggling for the last eight years just to get some electric supply from EDF, now I have to erect a poly tunnel that I bought 3 years ago.

[Sadoldhippy]

I wonder how the bankers and the corporate tax evaders will be punished. Personally I think that if we are to have any change from the current ecocidal trends then we will have to have riots etc as they will not give up power willingly.
Also, as a former EF!-er I faced charges of aggravated trespass and other things while doing non-violent direct action. I see this as just another way of demonising those on benefits (just like Republicans in the US) and another stick to control normal people while the elite will not be touched.